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How many love songs in the world?

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

There’s a service call ChaCha which lets users text any question to ChaCha ( 242242 ), call 1-800-2chacha, or internet, and receive a response via SMS in minutes. I took a chance and threw them a question, “How many love songs are in the world?”

Bing! Here’s the answer: “There are millions of love songs, they’ve been written as long as there has been love and music. ChaCha out!”

The ChaCha’s response didn’t wow me anymore than what I already knew. What made me pause in admiration was the simple fact that over the years and millions of love songs after human beings are still writing about the same subject, LOVE. ChaCha just made it easier for me to ask what I thought was a silly question.

Perhaps by adding a new rhythm, color, tone of voice, face, and sets of new circumstances a new love song could wow a new crowd of audience. And everybody knows that because new target markets can respond to the same subject, LOVE, differently. And it shouldn’t come as a suprise that each audience prefers to give, receive, and communicate love differently. From record albums, to LPs, to cassette tapes, to CDs, MP3 players, IPODs, Napster, internet radio and music streaming, Sirius XM satellite radio and everything in betweens, the creators, producers, and singers of love songs have changed over time. And speaking of love songs and music aggregator, there are even songs about love songs.

Further, loyal fans of country music often steer away from rap music, and those outnoised by both country and rap have developed their own style call “crap”. And that’s just Western style American music. Let’s not forget the 80% of the world that have their own styles and lyrics.

Where am I going with this?

Well I hope to have stitched the dots between possibilities and sameness like LOVE songs. Certainly if millions of love songs could be written and sung and thousands of songs about love songs have been written and sung, the possibilities that one could take a topic such as business, management, communication, product, marketing, revenue, supply chain, technology, presentation, personal and professional development, education, poverty reduction, and sing a better tune are limitless.

There is always a new way of taking an existing idea, concept, or product and make it better. No matter how boring or tiresome something might appear, sometimes it just needs a little more wow.

If you were to take the same song with the same words and same music and have 50 people sing it, you’d be fortunate to find one great singer. Likewise, if you have heard something a million times before, the next time you hear the same might be just what you never heard before.

Posted in Management, Marketing, Process, Product | No Comments »

How do you spell Relief?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

In 1974 an antacid product launched perhaps one of the most memorable brand in history. Muscle soreness and stomach aches relating to constipation were easily rectified with a simple spelling test. To further its famous test, Rolaids sponsors the Major League Baseball award for top relief pitchers, called the Rolaids Relief Man of the Year Award. The award has been given yearly since 1976.

Rolaids tablets are refreshingly flavorful and colorful ranging from original peppermint, cherry, freshmint, fruit, tropical, punch, cool mint, and berry.

How could a single product have made such an impact on millions of lives? Well, the company made an offer to the public which came out like this, “If you need relief, just spell r-o-l-a-i-d-s.” Millions of consumers bought into it, it worked, and the brand became trusted.

Rolaids proves there is an exception to everything and sometimes the right product comes at the wrong time. The company was able to spell its way to first in mind.

Posted in Marketing, Product | No Comments »

A WoWonder Moment in Time

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

I can’t recall a single time that ( what I am about to share with you ) has happenned to me and my wife after countless hours and triple digit weeks we’ve spent online chatting, sharing work, personal photos, and discussing everything from life to lemon juice, yet just as I began to piece the next topic for Good to WOW, it arrived.

Why all of the sudden this just happenned? It made her ( and now me ) wonder and that’s exactly the point I hope to make.

In the middle of the afternoon I skyped my wife to say hi. No earth shattering event there – As innocent and as simple as that is to many of us, her response was quite different and unexpected. She said, “WOW!”

Huh? Say it again please honey?

She said, “WOW! How did you know I just arrived in the office?” I explained to her that I didn’t know and I only felt that she was there all along. It wasn’t such a “WOW!” moment for me as it was for her, and after some probing into the real stimulant for the thrilling response, she clarified that my skype message made her wonder which led her to the wow moment.

Great! This case study passed our W-O-W T-E-S-T-S.

Posted in Marketing, Product | No Comments »

What the heck is a SkyMall?

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

On a recent flight from Minneapolis to LAX I found myself entertained as well as captivated by the onflight SkyMall sales catalog. One could find hundreds of innovative products ranging from video camera embedded sunglasses to solar-powered battery chargers, to web-based monitoring systems for appliances, GPS speed trap detectors, deleted phone message readers, and other devices second only to those found in the latest James Bond movie.

Every flight passenger is a target audience which is why every seat is provided with a sales catalog. It’s difficult and can be irresistible to not want to thumb through when you have nothing else better to do than sit for 3 hours.

AND like many others, I took the opportunity to read every word in the SkyMall magazine, and , after noticing the “Free copy — Take it. We’ll Replace it!” front cover encouragement, I did just that. I took one home.

I am particularly fond of the fact that SkyMall has made it easy to order products from their sales catalog. You could visit their website Skymall.com, text an ad # to 49432, or order by phone.

Whether you are a real estate agent wanting to sell houses, a retailer looking to sell ice cream, or an entrepreneur looking to develop a new product or service, the most important element in the sales process is your ability to take the customers’ money when they want to spend it most.

In the new world order of AnyWhere shopping, time is the least readily available commodity. Not having the right payment option at the right time is like refusing money.

Skymall, like all the McDonald’s on every street corner across America, knows how and when to take your money. After all, isn’t the difference between a qualified target customer and one that isn’t, is timing?

Posted in Marketing, Process, Product, Revenue Model | 2 Comments »

Nothing is worse than having the perfect idea, at the wrong time

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

It’s not at all difficult to save time, money, and energy from bad ideas. Just the reverse actually, when a person wakes up to a good idea, he’s often motivated by its potential, its market shares, and the excitement that comes with it. When a good idea is discovered, founders invest endless hours, borrow substantial amounts of money, take uncalculated risks, and frequently overlook the most obvious to the neutral eye.

A good idea at the wrong time can be more costly than even the worst of ideas.

Over the next several days I’ll post examples of good ideas, that for one reason or another, came to light at the wrong time. See for yourself how the difference between good and wow is timing, and nothing but timing.

What are your thoughts?

Posted in Management, Marketing, Process, Product, Revenue Model, Supply Chain | 4 Comments »

Why shop from home when you can shop from anywhere?

Friday, May 21st, 2010

Faced with an advertiser’s liquidity problem, a radio station was forced to accept as compensation ( it’s hard to believe but true ) – paid in full with can openers. How could anyone create monetary value with can openers? Silly answer perhaps, but how about selling through on-air personality Bob Circosta for $9.95 each. Guess what? They all sold out and birth was given to radio home shopping. This was in 1977.

From this idea, in 1982, Lowell Bud Paxson created the Home Shopping Club, a local cable channel that could be viewed on various cable channels.

Four years after home shopping was founded, Joseph Segel, after watching a videotape of the Home Shopping Network ( now HSN ), identified gaps and potential improvements in how products should be offered and presented. Segel went on to create QVC ( stands for Quality, Value, Convenience ) and signed up fifty-eight cable stations in twenty states to carry its first live broadcast, reaching 7.6 million TV homes. Segal accomplished this by offering stocks to cable companies at a price of 20¢ a share while publicly available for $10 a share. In its first trading day QVC reached $20 per share and subsequently set a new record for first full-year fiscal sales for a new public company of $112 million.

Home shopping isn’t quixotic when you look at all the innovative and not-before-seen products that it sells: collectibles, fashion, cosmetics, shoes, home goods, kitchen gadgets, labor saving devices, unique food items, electronics and gift items. These product areas mirror the 90%-plus female audience. Recent statistics also show growth in the male market with NASCAR, the NFL, and Craftsman tools.
Where else could Naeem Khan’s evening designer dresses be sold out in just 10 minutes? How else could 30,000 Pieces of apparel designer Carlos Flachi sell over one weekend of his live appearances. And which other medium could Falchi handbags sell for $1600 each. HSN of course.

The television home shopping business is simple and exciting – but comes also with risk to the business owner. After months of persuading the network’s buyer, and having met all of the legal and quality control standards of the network, the inventor or seller will be issued a purchase order. Every purchase order must come with a full return privilege to the shopping network, meaning if the product does not sell, the network can return it to the seller.

According to Ladenburg Thalman & Co, the following is the breakdown for spending on home shopping in 2nd quarter 2009:

52 percent — Home, electronics and hard goods
17 percent — Jewelry
21 percent — Health and Beauty
10 percent — Fashion (apparel and accessories)

As can be expected, things aren’t as rosy these days for the home shopping business. Profits at the shopping channels fell 10-25% because of slowing sales. Adding to injury, all of the home shopping networks suffer from customers defaulting on their in house credit cards. When you consider that almost 100% of home shopping customers use credit cards to make purchases, home shopping networks have no cash paying customers

And Home Shopping has come a long ways since the days of call centers and interactive voice response systems to process orders. In 1994, in response to industry research which showed that just 8% of Americans ever bought from home-shopping shows, HSN began exploring new distribution channels for their merchandise. The theory was that if consumers wanted the freedom to choose which products and when they wanted to see, home shopping networks wanted to deliver the experience.

It seemed like a natural idea then for HSN to partner with Prodigy and Compuserve users, allowing online order purchases at the click of a button, using credit-card and shipping data already supplied to the online service. However, profiles of the average home-shopping customer -a middle-age, lower-income female-is quite the opposite from the online customer, who’s more often a young male professional. Whereas TV home shoppers flocked to jewelry and apparel, the online populations are more interested in electronic gadgets and sporting goods.

Today, HSN no longer just sells clothing, kitchen appliances, and cosmetics. The company also promotes products from companies like Kraft during its scheduled programming. According to Wall Street Journal, HSN will air a three-minute segment in which an HSN chef will show how to create a recipe from Kraft’s Food & Family magazine using Kraft products.

While some critics and tech-revolutionaires have argued that the home shopping industry’s death began with the birth of eBay, Amazon, and online behemoths, the truth often lurks in the middle.

Here’s why:

The more buyers can see you sell, the more you sell:

Shopping channels use seven to eight minute segments to discuss and demonstrate their products, while a typical spot on television is only one to two minutes at best. It’s proven time and time again that time matters; most sales made are in the final moments, not the first two.

Brand loyalty

Years of experience and presence on TV have earned Home Shopping a line of loyal customers. Over half of home shoppers buy 50 or more items per year. Knowledge, acceptance and trust: Home Shopping Networks have them. Shoppers also understand that if they are unhappy for any reason, they can get their money back.

Controlled media costs

The increasing cost of media is making direct response advertising more challenging. With shopping channels, the networks are owned, therefore they do not fall victim to increasing media costs or availability challenges. With live television it’s easy to calculate cost when you can see how many units have sold in real-time.

Pricing Advantage

Shopping channels strive for a 45% to 60% pricing model, giving them a better chance at profitability than the conventional five or seven to one models from direct response.

Product Credibility Factor

Accompanying each product presented in home shopping, an expert ( often the founder/inventor ) of the product details his “how it came about” story and other wow factors associated with the product. Customers can hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Personal recommendations & testimonials

The chance to receive feedback — love or hate — directly from the public is a positive advancement in commerce. Shopping networks have developed their own on-air talents, people that are considered trusted sources of information. When a talent gets excited about a product, the viewers follow. Shopping networks take on-air calls from people who have already bought and love a product. It is as if the viewer can eavesdrop on the neighborhood chatline.

Brand & Marketing Development

Home shopping networks have just as much interest in the success of a product as its inventor or owner. A typical 8-minute primetime airing on QVC is the equivalent of $300,000 of advertising for a product. Imagine having a trusted household company that every knows buys your product and throws in free advertising. One study reports eight minutes on QVC is worth about the equivalent of 50 spots on any other network. The difference is home shopping viewers are ready and willing to buy NOW.

Traffic

Websites like those of QVC and HSN are amongst the most-visited and best-converting sites. Last I checked, QVC rolled in over 4 million unique visitors a month and HSN pulled in about half the amount. Why shop from home when you can shop from anywhere? It’s easy. One simply needs to understand that anywhere includes at home.

Just two weeks ago, JC Penny, the 103 year-old company reported it has scaled back store openings and increased spending on mobile shopping. Ecommerce makes up just 9% of its $17.5 billion in annual revenue.

Likewise, Kohl’s Department Store is spending $100 million on e-commerce, and adding new distribution centers to fill online orders.

Andrew Bartels, of Forrester research, says it best, “This is a case of necessity being the mother of investment.”

The ability to shop from anywhere and everywhere is the future of shopping. While internet shopping may be slow when compared to televised sellathons, video and speed will create interactions like never before experienced through traditional home shopping. It could well become a chase between the construction of mobile shopping destinations and efficient bricks-and-mortar deconstruction. Whether it started on television, bricks, or internet, the finish line is mobile shopping. “WOW!” That’s how the winner will receive his approbation.

And anywhere shopping is definately at the right time.

Posted in Management, Marketing, Process, Product, Supply Chain | 12 Comments »

Candy.com and other domain-driven businesses

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Back in the days ( late 1990s ) when the mass had just become acquainted with the web and newly born Google hadn’t quite earned the attention it receives today; when popular websites had to have the letter E or word cyber in front; a simple search on Yahoo took 2-3 minutes just to load the search result. Before the introduction of search navigation such as Real Names, many surfers simply typed a keyword and then .com to find what they were looking for.

At the time, generic domain names such as loan.com, men.com, travel.com, mortgage.com, sex.com, casino.com, gambling.com, poker.com, and business.com were selling for millions more than real estate.
Before Godaddy.com and before other high profile domain name registration sites entered the E scene, I remembered a specific television spot luring prospects to register their dreams, register their pet names, register their hobbies and passions, and register their business online. Basically, any person from anywhere should register a word s/he wanted with the word dot com after it. That was the push. All they had to do was visit Register.com.

As I write this, the domain candy.com had recently sold for $3 million, insure.com $16 million, webcam.com $1 million, sever.com $770,000, screensaver.com $330,000, musicvideos.com $225,000, and biking.com $250,000. Yahoo.com recently acquired OMG.com for $80,000. Who would have thought that something that cost as little as $10 a year could sell for hundreds of thousands, even millions?

Well it’s true. A domain such as Candy.com could sell for $3 million because a thousand or more people a day type in candy.com. In fact, more than 850,000 webpatriots every month search the keyword “candy”.
The name is easy to remember and easy to recall on radio, it’s short and it’s what people search.

Increasingly, entrepreneurs are paying top dollars for good domain names and many are building businesses to capture traffic and/or build businesses for resale. A visit to Spanish.com and you’ll see a website that provides a “search engine” experience for things related to Spanish. Candy.com has become a virtual store for everything candy and loan.com provides a loan comparison and searching site for everything related to loans.

While it’s true that a great domain name isn’t necessary for commerce and portals such as facebook, twitter, yahoo, amazon, google, and myspace have proven it — businesses with a penchant for protectionism or young enterprises desiring a piece of the pie would do well to seek short, easy-to-remember, and category specific or generic domains. As the internet become even more mobile in the months to come, domain names will increase in value as fewer surfers will want to search.

Candy.com, for example, offers greater pulling power than a keyword search for “candy” on google or yahoo. It’s easy to remember on return trips and reduces marketing and promotional cost. Which is why the new owner of candy.com happily paid $3 million. Clearly, domain-driven businesses have their advantages.

Domain driven commerce has been at the right time, ten years and counting.

Posted in Marketing, Process, Product, Revenue Model, Supply Chain | 8 Comments »

10-10-fone hype or business innovation?

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

In the late 1990′s, it was literally impossible to enjoy a decent dinner without having someone from MCI, AT&T, or Sprint call to pitch their “new” long distance plan. But with the average long distance rate priced at 30 CENTS a minute, a little pestering was a necessary evil. And when some commission earning salespeople began signing up people without permission, consumers outraged and filed complaints with the FTC and FCC. The term “slamming” became synonymous with pesky telephone operators who had illegally signed up customers without consent.

Telephone companies made comparison shopping difficult and with the onslaught of domestic and international calling plans, tracking the best deals became a daily chess match. One could get the best domestic rate, and still pay the highest for international rates. Or, pay a monthly fee for low international calling to a country of choice.

The long distance industry was able to effectively and systematically put consumers in a hynogogic state of mind. Families were paying high rates for long distance and in some cases over-spending by hundreds a month, namely international calling. Some customers even had their long distance privilege stripped away due to unpaid bills.

It was during this same time period that the telecom mania introduced pre-paid calling cards. With prepaid calling cards, consumers no longer had to worry about overspending. Whatever one’s budget for calling became his/her call management card. Finally, international callers could give big bills their long-awaited quietus.

As prepaid calling cards gained in popularity the traditional telephone mammoths stepped up their mindsharing campaigns with:

10-10-321
10-10-220
10-10-345
10-16-570
10-10-811
10-10-566
10-10-719
10-10-297
10-10-987
10-10-457
10-10-636
10-10-811
10-10-868

In some cases, MCI and AT&T secretly marketed more than one 10-10 numbers. It was as if the big boys were tracking and testing which calling plans had the highest response rate. Clever. Hardly a day went by without seeing or hearing Dennis Miller, Tony Danza, ALF, Hulk Hogan, John Lithgow or Sugar Ray Leonard hawk their “exciting” 10-10 saving plan.

With 10-10 calling codes, callers could use a calling plan of choice regardless of the subscribed-to long distance provider. Unfortunately, many of these so- called dial-around services had hidden surcharges, monthly fees and minimum talk times. For example, some 10-10 plans guaranteed up to 20 minutes of talk time for 99 CENTS. Thus even a one second call could cost the caller 99 CENTS. Others had a minimum fee per call, making a quick 30 second call cost $2-4.

Leading up to 2010, the line between local and long distance calls has become gray. With the advent of the internet and voip services like skype, magic jack and vonage, and telephone number portability, any caller could take his local number and place or receive calls from anywhere in the world. For a small fee of $2 to $3 and web connection, calls from the U.S. to Japan cost the same as that from a next door neighbor.

What is the future of telephone? Is there one?

Posted in Management, Marketing, Process, Product, Revenue Model, Supply Chain | 1 Comment »

1-800-Flowers.com: A Multi-Commerce, Marketing, Procurement, and Product In ONE

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

I became aware of this 30+ year old company when I switched from Prodigy to AOL as my internet service provider — Way back in the mid 1990s. I didn’t realize at the time how lucrative the flower business was until 1-800-FLOWERS began pushing ads all over AOL, radio and television.

1-800-Flowers revolutionized the flower delivery business by offering a generic easy-to-remember point of contact vanity telephone number for nationwide flower delivery. Where before, consumers had to visit multiple local flower merchants, or arrange for flowers to be delivered across the country via FTD, a sort of multiple listing service for flowers.

However, with less than 20 percent of orders coming in via touch-tone telephone, to capitalize on the sales potential of the Internet, 1-800-Flowers reinvented itself as 1-800-Flowers.com.

It was in the early days of 2000, when many so-called eBusinesses struggled to pay the bills ( DOT BOMBS THEY WERE CALLED )–ending multiyear and multimillion-dollar marketing deals on Yahoo, Excite and AOL that 1-800-FLOWERS.com multi-commerce vision aligned.

In early 2001, 1-800-FLOWERS.com partnered with 2Roam, Inc., a wireless application software and service provider, to make it quick and easy for customers to interact and make purchases from any handheld wireless device, such as mobile phones and PDAs. Again in 2006, 1-800-FLOWERS.com launched a mobile website which led to a partnership with Digby to develop a complete mobile commerce channel.

Today, with one of the most recognized brands in online retailing, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM is a first mover at providing a broad range of gift products including flowers, gourmet foods, candies, stuffed animals, popcorn, cookies, candy and wine, toys and games for children, home and garden merchandise, and gift baskets with different varieties of fruits, some with dry/canned goods (such as tea, coffee, crackers and jam). Customers can visit the company’s website, call its toll free number, or visit a company-operated or franchised store.

The company focuses all its marketing and promotions on driving customers to 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, and generating repeat business.

1-800-FLOWERS.com has enjoyed year-after-year growth since 2000 and averages a 40% gross margin. The economic slump of 2008-2009, however, has resulted in a revenue decline of $205 million, or $714 million from 2008′s $919 million.

Recently, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM recognized that the flower delivery industry is largely driven by major holidays — namely Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, and has re-invented itself by launching a new brand 1-800-Baskets to tap into the lucrative $16 billion gift basket industry.

In time we’ll know whether the new 1-800-BASKETS.COM is a natural extension of the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM product line, or drift from its flower focus business model.

Additionally, while the company’s natural advantage is its toll-free 1-800 vanity line, the benefits of a toll free number in today’s market could be less significant than ten years ago when telephone calling plans didn’t include free nationwide calling.

With over 281 area codes throughout the United States, any local flower shop can specialize and compete by acquiring the telephone number FLOWERS (356-9377) with the area code of choice. In short, it matters little to a consumer whether a telephone number is 1-800-flowers, 1-651-flowers, 1-770-flowers, or any area code flowers because today’s telephone plans include free nationwide calling.

1-800-FLOWERS.COM is a leading multi-commerce store, having reaped in the benefits of an integrated business model with toll free vanity, retail front, e-commerce, and m-commerce. Will toll free calling plans put a dent ( or more? ) to this category killer?

One could argue that the 2008-2009 economic crisis was egregious to the point that fewer people were sending flowers, or that multi-commerce and free calling plans were forces that haven’t been dealt with.